The cities were small; Phnom Penh, the largest, had substantially fewer than one hundred thousand inhabitants at the end of World War II. To the peasants, city dwellers were officials who enforced rules, landlords who controlled the land, and owners of financial and commercial enterprises (often foreigners) to whom the peasants were indebted. The results of long-term resentment can be seen in the practice under Pol Pot of having people turn up “the palm of the hand – roughened, it saved – if not it was death.”25 Vickery reports that he heard a similar story in 1962 from an urban schoolteacher who was stopped by Issarak while traveling on a bus in 1952. The Issarak ("free") were anti-French groups and antiroyalist freedom fighters active between 1946 and 1954. He survived only because he sat in the back and security forces arrived before the Issarak reached him. The others with smooth palms were taken away. The violence preceding 1975 – the U.S. bombing, the invasion, and the revolutionary war-affected the countryside most, and this intensified peasant hostility toward city dwellers.
The treatment of the new people under Pol Pot had specific cultural origins as well. They were treated as slaves, without any rights. Slavery had a long history in Cambodia. According to the report of a Chinese envoy in 1296-97, the majority of the people in Angkor, the capital city of the Angkor empire, were slaves. There were three classes of slaves, one of them hereditary. Six hundred years later, in the 1850s, the French discovered the Angkor complex and found a prosperous Buddhist monastery tended by over a thousand hereditary slaves. The French attempted to eliminate slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century, but at first found the institution so deeply rooted that they allowed it to continue. It was outlawed only at the beginning of this century.26 In addition to its other uses, slavery was regarded as a means of civilizing people such as “wild” mountain tribes.
The new people were forced to work the land and to build elaborate irrigation systems. The Cambodian kings too had used forced labor in extensive building programs, which often included irrigation systems and reservoirs. David Chandler notes that the only feature of Cambodian life singled out for praise by the Pol Pot system was the mobilization of the people by King Jayavarman VII, late in the twelfth century, to build ternpies, hospitals (maintanence and food supplied by slaves), reservoirs, and rest houses for travelers. Like the Khmer Rouge, this king stated as a central motive for his policies compassion for the people and the desire to deliver them from pain. Forcing hundreds of thousands of people to build his structures could serve compassion in his mind because building a city and temples to honor the Buddha “assured workers of less suffering and greater happiness – but in another life.”27
Thus class divisions and the urban-rural rift were sources of devaluation of the wealthy and educated that helped the Khmer Rouge gain followers, and the Cambodian history of slavery and forced labor provided a cultural blueprint for their policies.
Orientation to authority. The authoritarian-hierarchical character of Cambodian society was probably one source of the totalitarian system created by the Pol Pot regime. A Portuguese missionary who was in Cambodia in 1556 wrote that the people
dare do nothing of themselves, nor accept anything new without leave of the king, which is why Christians cannot be made without the king’s approval. And if some of my readers should say that they could be converted without the king knowing it, to this I answer that the people of the country is of such a nature, that nothing is done that the king knoweth not; and anybody, be he ever so simple may speak with the king, wherefore everyone seeketh news to carry unto him, to have an occasion for to speak with him; whereby without the king’s good will nothing can be done.28
Ever since the great empire of Angkor (ninth to fourteenth century), the king had been elevated to the rank of a god. The tremendous temples of Angkor Wat served the cult of the divine king.29 Although the actual power of the king diminished greatly under the French protectorate, his symbolic power probably increased. As the French eliminated princely offices, the king became the sole center of the nation. The people repeatedly demonstrated their tremendous devotion to him during French rule. Disrespect shown to the king by the French was one cause of an uprising that occurred in 1884. In January 1916 dissatisfied peasants came to Phnom Penh to petition the king or merely to see and talk to him, until thirty thousand of them were in the capital.30
The king’s authority over the aristocracy resided in his capacity to assign titles, roles in the government, and authority over land cultivated by the peasants that entitled them to a share of the crop. Wealth was not inherited; it was returned to the king when the owner died. Possessions, land, and rank were all held at the king’s pleasure. Offenses against the king were strictly punished, for example, by stripping the offender of his possessions. The authority of the king over the peasants was also maintained by superstitions, such as the belief that he controlled rainfall. The role of the king in Cambodian society provided a cultural blueprint for absolute authority and made it easier for people to accept the absolute authority of the Khmer Rouge.
Sihanouk became king in 1941. After the country gained independence, he abdicated, was elected prime minister, and continued to rule. For the common people he continued to fulfill the role of king, providing a source of authority and guidance, representing a way of life, and helping them maintain a world view
